Exploration

Archive: 7 March 2013

Our youngest tends to wake up fairly early in the morning, at least as compared to his sisters, and since I need less sleep than Kat I’m usually the one who gets up with him. This morning, he put away a box he’d just emptied of toys and I told him, “Well done!” He turned to me, stuck his hand up in the air, and said with glee, “Hive!”

I gave him the requested high-five, of course, and then another for being proactive. It was the first time he’d ever asked for one. He could not have looked more pleased with himself.

And I suddenly realized that I wanted to be able to say to my glasses, “Okay, dump the last 30 seconds of livestream to permanent storage.”

There have been concerns raised about the impending crowdsourced panopticon that Google Glass represents. I share those concerns, though I also wonder if the pairing of constant individual surveillance with cloud-based storage mediated through wearable CPUs will prove out an old if slightly recapitalized adage: that an ARMed society is a polite society. Will it? We’ll see—pun unintentional but unavoidable, very much like the future itself.

And yet. You think that you’ll remember all those precious milestones, that there is no way on Earth you could ever forget your child’s first word, or the first time they took their first steps, or the time they suddenly put on an impromptu comedy show that had you on the floor laughing. But you do forget. Time piles up and you forget most of everything that ever happened to you. A few shining moments stay preserved, and the rest fade into the indistinct fog of your former existence.

I’m not going to hold up my iPhone or Android or any other piece of hardware all the time, hoping that I’ll manage to catch a few moments to save. That solution doesn’t scale at all, but I still want to save those moments. If my glasses (or some other device) were always capturing a video buffer that could be dumped to permanent storage at any time, I could capture all of those truly important things. I could go back and see that word, that step, that comedy show. I would do that. I wanted to do it, sitting on the floor of my child’s room this morning.

That was when I realized that Glass is inevitable. We’re going to observe each other because we want to preserve our own lives—not every last second, but the parts that really matter to us. There will be a whole host of side effects, some of which we can predict but most of which will surprise us. I just don’t believe that we can avoid it. Even if Google fails with Glass, someone else will succeed with a very similar project, and sooner than we expect. I’ve started thinking about how to cope with that outcome. Have you?